News Archive 2014

On the newest episode of "The Glenn Show," Professor of Economics Glenn Loury talks to Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago about Paul Krugman’s criticism of Paul Ryan’s comments on inner-city poverty.

James Green, professor of history and brazilian studies and director of the Brazil Initiative, comments on Brazil's preparations to mark the 50th anniversary this week of the 1964 coup that brought the military to power. “People are reflecting on the past and teaching a new generation of Brazilians about the dictatorship,” said Green.

Amy Austin Holmes, a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute, unveils the truth behind the military intervention following the Bahraini uprising during the Arab Spring, and why there has been little to no media coverage of the events.

In a continuation of an op-ed from last week, Sergei Khrushchev, senior fellow at the Watson Institute, asks whether it's "fair for the U.S. to expect unconditional obedience from Russia against its own national interests?"

Stephen Kinzer, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, writes that despite the American instinct to help out with violent upheavals taking place around the world, "Regional actors, not the United States, should take the lead in dealing with them."

On the "Dan Yorke State of Mind" telelvision show, Michael Kennedy, professor of international studies, and Anna Lysyanskaya, professor of computer science, discuss the latest developments in Ukraine.
"Will we allow Putin's reality, which is based on force and lies, to define an ever-growing part of the world...or will we try to challenge that reality with our own capacities and commitment to the rule of law?" Kennedy asked.
Read Kennedy's recently published pieces on globalpost.com and publicseminar.org.

Timothy Edgar, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, comments on the “Raw Take” order, which was enacted after Sept. 11 to weaken restrictions on sharing private information about Americans in order to lower various bureaucratic barriers that impeded counterterrorism specialists across the government from working together. “Without the ability to have a small group of people that would be able to share intelligence at an earlier stage, at a raw stage,” Edgar said, “it was hard to cooperate at a more technical level.”

The Financial Times reviews Brown-India Initiative Director Ashutosh Varshney's new book, Battles Half Won, alongside Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi, the latest from author Rana Dasgupta, who will be in residence at Watson this spring.

Elias Muhanna, assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown and faculty in the Middle East Studies program, describes the "birth" of a new government in Lebanon and explains how Syria's war has become Lebanon's, too.